What do I think of Holding’s book on conspiracies? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.
My ministry partner J.P. Holding recently sent me a copy of his latest E-Book on dealing with conspiracy theories. Like many of his recent E-Books, this is a quick read as I tend to only read the Kindle at night and managed to go through it in just a few nights.
The whole theme of the book is about conspiracies that are often believed today involving any number of topics such as Alexander Hislop or the masons and Jesuits or whether Pope Francis or Barack Obama are the antichrist.
The title refers to such an idea as an example with the agnostic John Allegro writing a book where Christianity was a cult group that was created due to the effects of a certain mushroom in the area on the minds of the people. It was such a bad book that Allegro wrote on the topic that fourteen scholars took out an ad against it.
From here, Holding goes on to discuss various beliefs of people who are big into conspiracies. Naturally, such people can be hard to reason with because as soon as you deny the claim that they are making, well that’s because you’re part of the conspiracy! This is quite evident to several of us who have had to deal with the claims of Zeitgeist. If we’re not part of the conspiracy directly, well we’re just horribly duped by it.
Many of these you will just find it hard to believe. How can anyone take any of these seriously? Alas, I don’t doubt that many do. Most of these I had frankly never heard of. It would indeed be a stretch many times to put the occult significance into many of the items mentioned as no one would really notice. How can you convince people of a message if no one can understand the message?
I say this as someone who regularly gets asked questions about so many items in the world. Is X occult? Is this pagan? Over and over. Nowadays, it’s come to the point that when someone asks me if something is demonic, my default position is no because I’ve heard a case for most everything being demonic.
Perhaps also that’s something different about this book. I wasn’t able to get into this one as much and it could be because I’ve heard claims of “Demonic” so many times that I just start to roll my eyes. There are some ways I would also like to see some changes in future editions.
First, I kept wanting there to be some different title for the people being addressed. I heard conspiracy buffs, conspiracy guys, conspiracy X regularly. Holding is quite good at finding an appropriate label and sticking it most of the time so I was hoping there was just one humorous term we could include over these people.
The second area that I would like to see change in is that at the start, we are told we will be shown how to find the answers to this. I think it would be quite helpful for Holding to describe how he as one skilled in the use of a library, went about doing his research. What questions should one ask when considering a conspiracy theory? What resources should one look to? What resources should one not look to? What should qualify as a standard of proof?
Still, this is an interesting read and most of the time you’ll be rolling your eyes thinking “These people really believe that?” The sad answer is “Yes.”
In Christ,
Nick Peters